Martine said system officials have been working with Colorado State University-Pueblo on the school’s budget challenges since August 2012, according to email documents released by the system this week.

A series of emails between Martin, CSU-Pueblo President Lesley Di Mare and Richard Schweigert, system chief financial officer, date back to Aug. 28, 2012.

An email from Schweigert to Martin on that day painted a picture of CSU-Pueblo’s budget problems, focusing on the school’s declining enrollment. At the time, Martin was two weeks into his job as chancellor.

The email explained that overall enrollment was down 7 percent fall 2011 to fall 2012 and the full-time equivalent student count was down 307.

Martin offered initial observations about the challenges facing the school in an email sent to Schweigert Dec. 12, 2012.

“Clearly CSU-P is a special institution with a uniquely special mission. It is important to the CSU System, the state and its community,” Martin wrote.

He also talked about Di Mare inheriting a difficult financial situation saying that she was “In the process of assembling a strong team and aggressively seeking solutions.”

He wrote about a reduction in professional non-teaching staff by at least 15 percent.

He also talked about developing the South Denver Metro region creating a “mini-campus” that could provide CSU-Pueblo with an opportunity to utilize current under-utilized faculty resources.

Several emails stressed the importance of developing an aggressive plan to lead to long term stability for the Belmont campus.

Faculty and staff have expressed frustration that they were never engaged as a partner in the process.

“The campus university budget board began to look at budget situations starting in December of 2012,” Martin said.

“They actually produced a report with a whole bunch of recommendations in April of 2013… This shouldn’t have been a surprise.”

Martin said the next step is moving forward to make the school better in the future.

He said he wants to help build a system where each of the schools thrive on its own while contributing to the success of the others.

“The conversation ought to be where do we go from here? Not looking in the review mirror,” Martin said.